Tech is robbing us of the precious ability to forget. Soon, we won't be able to move on from the past

One of our most fundamental capabilities, to be able to forget and move on, is being eroded. The drugs doing the damage are Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram, and we're all happily popping as many pills as we can, day after day.

For the first time in the long stretch of human history, we have the ability to record everything, which seems to have coincided with a rapacious appetite to do just that. And unfortunately — as is so often the case — we're too busy exploring what we can do to worry about whether we really should. Of course we're still on the cusp of this psychological sea change: Facebook only opened its doors to the world in 2006. What's frightening is the rate at which the technology is developing, both in how much we are recording and how easy it is to resurface it.

To pick on Google for a moment, its Glass headset lets you record every moment, and its all-pervading Google+ social network then picks out the edited highlights for you. We're not talking about five or ten years down the line: yesterday Google launched a tool that "produces highlight reels from your photos and videos — complete with effects, transitions and a soundtrack — automatically." Google can now remember it for you wholesale, and share it with all your friends, too. As we've signed up for one social media network after another we've signed away our rights to forget the ugly memories and apply a rosy tint to the best ones.

Instead, all of these past moments crowd upon our present, staring back unblinking across the years (or even from beyond the grave), a constant reminder of how good we once had it or how bad we once felt. Our finely tuned, highly evolved brains all of a sudden have a digital extension pack that never runs out of memory and never fades away — quite how this is going to play out in generations to come is a scary thought. Social media has already amplified our need to be accepted and our tendency to judge ourselves against the lives of others, and if it can cause as much disruption to our powers of recollection then this is something we can't dismiss lightly.

Our memories are selective for a very good reason, to provide a buffer against the past and a net through which anything that's not useful can float freely through. Indeed, in recent years neuroscientists have suggested forgetting is an active clearing process triggered by the brain; an inability to properly forget has also been linked to conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Now the net is tightening, without us giving it a second thought.

Gimmicky it may be, but Snapchat's self-destructing low-resolution photos and videos seem to offer up a better solution: I was here, and this is what I saw. Now let's forget it ever happened.